Info Brief: Collapse of Reconstruction

Learn about the collapse of Reconstruction.

The Reconstruction era featured an inspiring promise of multiracial democracy. While the United States took great strides towards fulfilling that promise, this moment of promise was all too brief. It would take almost a full century before Reconstruction’s promise of civil and political equality for Black Americans began to be protected again in law and in fact.

This is the story of the collapse of Reconstruction. Reconstruction did not end overnight, and it did not end with a single, defining tragedy. It was killed by sustained anti-Black violence, a wave of Jim Crow laws, and apathetic Northerners who tired of enforcing Reconstruction against white Southerners.

White Terrorism, Anti-Black Violence, and the Ku Klux Klan

As African Americans asserted their civil and political rights throughout the Reconstruction era, they were often met with violent opposition from white Southerners, many of whom were former Confederates. White terrorism represented one of the most terrifying threats facing African Americans during the era.

Just after the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, the Klu Klux Klan was formed by former Confederates to reassert white rule using terrorist violence. This violence targeted not only African Americans, but their white political allies. In particular, the Klan used violence and murder to stop African Americans from voting. The Klan burned Black churches and schools, intimidated and murdered Black voters, and resorted to physical assault and murder.

Why did Klan violence often go unpunished? In part, local Southern law enforcement officials supported the Klan’s goals. Some were members of the Klan themselves. So, Klan violence was rarely prosecuted in local or state courts.

In response, Congress worked together with President Ulysses S. Grant to combat Klan violence and ensure the prosecution of Klan members. After the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, Congress passed the Enforcement Acts in 1870 and 1871 with the KKK in mind. These laws allowed the national government to enforce the rights protected under the 14th Amendment against even the private actions of the KKK.

As part of these efforts, Congress enacted the Klu Klux Klan Act in 1871—the most ambitious congressional effort to stop the violent attacks on African Americans in the South. (The modern version of the KKK Act, 42 U.S.C. § 1983, is one of the primary means of vindicating federal constitutional rights against state and local actors even today.)

Be it enacted…That any person who, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage of any State, shall subject, or cause to be subjected any person within the jurisdiction of the United States to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution of the United States, shall, any such law, statute, ordinance, regulation, custom or usage of the State to the contrary notwithstanding, be liable to the party injured in any action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress….

President Grant used this law to order the arrest of hundreds of Klan members. But this law did not eradicate the Klan—and political changes soon changed the national government’s willingness to fight the Klan.

The Election of 1876, the Compromise of 1877, and the Withdrawal of Federal Troops from the South

Another key moment in the collapse of Reconstruction was the presidential election of 1876, in which the Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes competed against Democrat Samuel J. Tilden.

No Democrat had been elected to the presidency since 1856—so, before the Civil War. (President Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency when Lincoln was assassinated.) The Democrats had won the U.S. House of Representatives in a landslide victory in 1874, and they had some political momentum.

Due to the anti-Black terrorism and violence in the South, the national government had occupied Southern governments with federal troops since the passage of the Reconstruction Acts in the late 1860s. The military oversaw Reconstruction and looked to ensure that Southern governments were permitting African Americans to exercise their rights and liberties, including the right to vote. Klan violence was one way the South sought to undermine the military occupation; the ballot box was the other way.

The Election of 1876 would be, at least in part, a national referendum on the Republican Reconstruction plan. In an election contest marred by efforts to suppress the African American vote throughout the South, early election results showed that Tilden had beaten Hayes in the popular vote by over 250,000 votes. Tilden came close to winning the Electoral College outright; early voting results showed that he would receive 184 electoral votes—one vote shy of the required 185 to win. Hayes had received 165 electoral votes. Twenty votes—from Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, and South Carolina—were still contested.

Both parties claimed victory in each of those states, and they fielded teams of supporters and lawyers to investigate voter fraud and irregularities in the states in question. Congress created an Electoral Commission, composed of Representatives, Senators, and Supreme Court Justices. The Commission was mostly split evenly between Republicans and Democrats. Congress gave this Commission authority to decide which of the conflicting electoral reports were valid.

The Compromise of 1877 resolved the election—and in doing so, it helped to further undermine Reconstruction. There was an unwritten, informal agreement in which the Republicans agreed to end the federal military occupation of the South in exchange for the Democrats accepting Hayes as the winner of the presidency.

Ultimately, the Commission granted all 20 of the contested votes to Hayes. Hayes won the presidency 185-184. After the election, as troops and Northern allies pulled out of the South, white “redeemer” Southerners reasserted their rule throughout the South.

The Supreme Court Narrows the Reach of the Reconstruction Amendments

Finally, the Supreme Court also played a role in the collapse of Reconstruction, reading the Reconstruction Amendments narrowly as early as 1873. In other words, the Court weakened those protections.

In The Slaughter-House Cases (1873), the Supreme Court read John Bingham’s beloved Privileges or Immunities Clause narrowly. This landmark ruling arose from a suit by 400 white butchers against a slaughterhouse monopoly in New Orleans. They argued that this state-created monopoly violated their 14th amendment rights—namely, their right to make a living in their chosen profession.

In a 5-4 decision, the Court concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment didn’t radically alter the American constitutional system. The majority feared that—if read broadly—the Fourteenth Amendment would allow the national government to take on too many duties (and powers) that traditionally went to the states.

In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Miller wrote that the framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment didn’t want to “transfer the security and protection of all...civil rights….from the states to the Federal Government” and thereby “fetter and degrade the state governments by subjecting them to the control of Congress” and “destroy the main features of the general system of American government.”

From there, in United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Supreme Court once again read the Reconstruction Amendments narrowly—there, letting alleged murderers go free. This case arose out of one of the largest—if not the largest—incidents of white violence against African Americans during Reconstruction, the Colfax Massacre in April 1873.

The incident took place in Louisiana. In March, conflicting local election results led to disputed certification over the parish sheriff: President Grant had commissioned one person, and local white Democrats had formed their own shadow government, conducted elections, and certified their own sheriff and judge. Local African American militia leaders took control of the courthouse in Colfax, ousting the Democratic shadow officials. The militia began arming and drilling—with many African Americans armed with the rifles they had carried as Union soldiers.

This infuriated local whites, who drummed up untrue and unsubstantiated allegations of Black violence towards white citizens to rally local white mobs. A murder of African American citizens three miles to the east had caused African Americans to flee to the courthouse. A group of 150 white people later attacked the courthouse and eventually drove African Americans out of the building by setting fire to it. More than 100 African Americans were shot and killed as they fled the fire.

William Cruikshank and other co-conspirators were prosecuted for these murders under the Enforcement Act of 1870. They were charged with infringing on constitutional rights of their African American victims. The Court unanimously ruled that the suit was improper, so Cruikshank and others went free.

Finally, in The Civil Rights Cases (1883), the Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875. This landmark law was the final action of Reconstruction Republicans before they lost the U.S. House of Representatives to the Democratic Party. It outlawed racial discrimination by private individuals in public accommodations—hotels, restaurants, public transportation, etc. (Nearly 100 years later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was modeled after the 1875 Act.)

The Court’s ruling was 8-1—with the majority opinion written by Justice Joseph Bradley. The Court concluded that the 13th Amendment “merely abolishe[d] slavery” and that the 14th Amendment did not give Congress the power to outlaw private acts of racial discrimination. (Lawyers call this the “state action” requirement—the state itself or its officials needed to act or be involved enough in private action for the 14th Amendment to apply.)

Justice Bradley: “It would be running the slavery argument into the ground to make it apply to every act of discrimination which a person may see fit to make as to guests he will entertain, or as to the people he will take into his coach or cab or car; or admit to his concert or theater, or deal with in other matters of intercourse or business. Innkeepers and public carriers, by the laws of all the states, so far as we are aware, are bound, to the extent of their facilities, to furnish proper accommodation to all unobjectionable persons who in good faith apply for them. If the laws themselves make any unjust discrimination, amenable to the prohibitions of the fourteenth amendment, congress has full power to afford a remedy under that amendment and in accordance with it.”

Justice John Marshall Harlan—a former slaveholder from Kentucky—issued a powerful dissent for himself alone. In fact, Justice Harlan wrote his dissent using the same pen that Chief Justice Roger Taney used to write his Dred Scott opinion.

Harlan believed that the majority ignored the text, history, and purposes of the 13th and 14th Amendments and the Civil Rights Act and allowed states to ignore their obligation to defend the rights of African Americans.

Justice Harlan: “No state, nor the officers of any state, nor any corporation or individual wielding power under state authority for the public benefit or the public convenience, can, consistently either with the freedom established by the fundamental law, or with that equality of civil rights which now belongs to every citizen, discriminate against freemen or citizens, in their civil rights, because of their race, or because they once labored under disabilities imposed upon them as a race.”

And more Harlan: “The rights which congress, by the act of 1875, endeavored to secure and protect are legal, not social, rights. The right, for instance, of [an African American] citizen to use the accommodations of a public highway upon the same terms as are permitted to white citizens is no more a social right than his right, under the law, to use the public streets of a city, or a town, or a turnpike road, or a public market, or a post-office, or his right to sit in a public building with others, of whatever race, for the purpose of hearing the political questions of the day discussed.”

Conclusion

Reconstruction did not collapse overnight, and it didn’t collapse from any single factor. The story of the collapse of Reconstruction is ultimately a story of the federal government and white Northerners growing tired of enforcing Reconstruction’s goals in the face of Southern white terrorism and violence. As always, political and electoral concerns shaped these responses.

As a result, as America turned to the beginning of the twentieth century, Reconstruction had collapsed. The promise of the Reconstruction Amendments lay mostly dormant until later in the twentieth century. The hard-fought civil and political equality briefly enjoyed by African Americans in the South dissipated, and an era of Jim Crow and segregation soon took its place.

In his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America, Black sociologist and historian W.E.B. DuBois summarized the rise and collapse of Reconstruction like this:

“The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

Want to join the conversation?

Sort by:

No posts yet.